Recovery is as much about developing new skills and intimacy in relationships as it is about developing and maintaining new boundaries around our sexual behavior. One of the abilities we need to develop if we want to build healthy relationships is trust. We need to develop our capacity for trust, and the wisdom to discern who is - and is not - trustworthy.

Look back on the last couple month. Are you trusting others more? Sometimes experiences from our past make it hard for us to open ourselves up to possible hurt or rejection. We might often feel anxious and suspicious of others.

We likely struggle with trust not only because of early life experiences (where people important to us were not trustworthy), but also because other experiences later in life reinforced our fears. When other people betrayed or disappointed us, the deeply-held core belief that “I can’t trust anyone to take care of me” got reinforced.

In recovery, we gradually open up ourselves to new and deeper relationships. We are learning to discern who the trustworthy people are in our lives. We will make mistakes, just like all people do when learning something new. We may share personal and private information with someone who later turns against us, and uses this information to damage our reputation. We may alienate people who misunderstand our intentions as we try to set boundaries about what we are willing to share and not share.

It’s okay to make these mistakes … we are learning! The important thing is to learn from our mistakes, while not retreating back to isolation.

If we find it hard to trust new people, counseling or group therapy might be helpful. In group therapy (or other recovery groups), we can hear other people’s stories and identify with them. We can learn to be sympathetic to their struggles and get comfortable admitting our own.

In the process of working through the ups and downs of our relationships, it’s important to be attentive and reflective, talking through our experiences with our sponsor, or keeping a journal and reflecting on what we are learning.

If you’ve had some bad experiences with others and are tempted to draw back into isolation, ask yourself if there are lessons you can learn that will help you be more discerning about trust, rather than give up on trust altogether.

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Addiction is like a tornado that leaves behind a path of destruction. It not only damages our lives as addicts, it also takes a tremendous toll on the people around us. Sex addiction in particular wrecks relationships (especially families). It creates sadness, anger, confusion, and a host of varied reactions from people who care about you.

Friends and family may resent us for the hurt our addiction caused them. Sometimes mixed in with that anger are feelings of sadness and worry that they may have been in some way responsible for our struggles.

Spouses sometimes take on the belief that if they were more attractive, attentive, or … something … that they could have kept us from doing what we did. Sometimes we as addicts believe this too, and this blame-shifting is part of our denial. But the reality is that no spouse is capable of meeting the needs of a sex addict. Even so, sex addiction is unique in the devastation it creates in the marital relationship.

Our friends and family can heal during our recovery. Each person must concentrate on his or her own issues while learning how to detach with love. There are groups that offer support for spouses of sex addicts, and Faithful and True Ministries also offers phone counseling for spouses who are struggling.

What makes sex addiction especially toxic for families is the wall of secrecy that is usually built around the addiction. Since sex is so personal, and fear of other people finding out about our struggles so overwhelming, many couples try to go about recovery while living in a bubble of secrecy and shame. Children, extended family, and friends experience various forms of suffering because of the addiction, and are often left in the dark about what is really going on.

Sometimes it’s necessary to withhold the truth of our addiction from people who were affected by it, because they can’t be trusted to handle the information. Discussions about how far to extend the circle of disclosure are ongoing and complex, especially during the early years of recovery. But even if we decide not to disclose the truth of our addiction to family and friends, we must honest with ourselves about the level of damage we have brought into their lives.

Our addiction touches all the people in our lives, whether we realize it or not. It causes us to neglect people we should be attentive to, to isolate ourselves, to be withdrawn or cranky, and sometimes even to sexualize people and situations that should not be sexualized.

Our awareness of this damage will grow over time, and we must be careful not to drift into shame and self-hatred when it does. Our shame dissipates as we keep working our recovery, and as we make amends to the people we have harmed in whatever ways are appropriate.

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In case you’re wondering how common Internet Pornography has become, this isolated example might be enough to demonstrate the point: A researcher at the University of Montreal wanted to do a study about the effects of pornography on the human brain, but had to change the focus of his study. He wanted to observe the effects of porn use on the brains of male students who were new to pornography. But there were none! Here’s an excerpt from a recent article about this:

When Universite de Montreal assistant professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse launched his project with men in their 20s, he wanted to interview subjects who had never been exposed to pornography — porn virgins.

But he couldn’t find any.

“Guys who do not watch pornography do not exist,” Lajeunesse of the university’s School of Social Work said Wednesday.

So his study examined the habits of 20 university students who consumed X-rated material — that would be all of them — and the impact on their sexual identity and how it shapes their relationships with women.

Lajeunesse found most boys seek pornography by age 10, at about the same time that they become curious about sex. They chose what they wanted to see and quickly rejected what they found offensive — for example, bestiality or violence.

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Recovery teaches us to look at ourselves instead of trying to fix others. We can’t waste time trying to change other people, we can only change ourselves. But if we can’t fix the people around us, how can we live with them? By practicing acceptance.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous emphasizes that we cannot find serenity until we accept things and people as they are. This is hard for many of us, for many reasons.

As Christians, we often struggle to accept people who disagree with us, or who have different standards of behavior. We worry that if we accept someone just as they are, then we are endorsing their moral and spiritual choices. If we want to help them grow or change, we feel we need to withhold acceptance. But that’s not true. In fact, it’s just the opposite. When we withhold acceptance - from others or from ourselves - we create conflict and lose the opportunity to stimulate positive change.

Carl Jung said, “We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”

We can accept someone without approving or agreeing with what they do. The reality is that we can’t change them - or control their behavior - anyway. All we can control is our own responses to them.

Our lack of acceptance creates stress and tension in relationships. It also cuts us off from many blessings.

I had a friend from one of the SA programs who was needing more support. I recommended a certain group to him. When he attended the group, he was dismayed because some of the members had a different approach to sobriety than he did. Rather than adopt a “live and let live” approach, and seek to learn from this other program and find the help he needed, he chose to go into a critical, judgmental mode, and refused to participate in the group any longer. He couldn’t get over his disagreement with how they approached recovery - and so lost the opportunity to get support and help he really needed.

Serenity comes when we concentrate on the attitudes we need to change instead of how the world around us needs to change. When we focus on another person’s negative qualities, those qualities grow larger. So why not focus instead on the good qualities?

Our serenity will grow as we develop reasonable, appropriate expectations of others. Remember that everyone is a work in progress. No one is perfect.  Can we accept them - and ourselves - even in the midst of that imperfection?

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Recovery from sex or porn addiction - or any addiction for that matter - is about so much more than staying clean and sober. Our journey begins with abstinence and moves into the lifelong process that involves spiritual transformation. Each day we are becoming more of the people we were meant to be. We are learning new ways of thinking, acting, relating, and being.

“Staying grounded” really is another way of talking about living with, or staying rooted in reality. It’s a matter of living life on life’s terms, rather than maniacally trying to fight against it. Staying grounded means we accept our powerlessness over other people, and many of the external circumstances of our lives. We focus on what is ours to control, and leave the rest in God’s hands. (There’s that Serenity Prayer thing again!)

One person writes this about his recovery: “I am not a person that finds serenity easily. My mind wanders, I go down paths that I know are destructive - I fall into bad behaviors that contribute to my defects of character. Serenity is work for me.”

Yes, serenity is work, especially for those of us who grew up without it. But we are learning.

No matter how our life circumstances shift and change, we can stay grounded by knowing that God is actively at work in our lives.

We also stay grounded by being in relationships with people who care about us and are willing to be honest with us. When we spend lots of time in our heads - in rumination, worry, and/or fantasy - we tend to lose touch with reality. Our thoughts drift and spin in circles, and are frequently based on erroneous assumptions or interpretations. When we get out of our heads and start talking with other people, our perspective shifts, and our thinking sharpens. We get grounded.

There is one caveat, however. Not all the people we spend time with are grounding for us. Some people are out of touch with reality themselves, or are so stuck in denial or resentment that they are unable to be open with us.

Some recovery groups call these people “crazy-makers.” They bring confusion, drama, and emotional triggers wherever they go. Getting grounded may involve making plans to limit the time we spend with these people.

Keep this in mind: if you want to stay sober, stay grounded.

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Our culture is very mixed up about sex. On the one hand, we seem to be obsessed with it. A quick glance at today’s music, movies, television shows, and magazines might make you think think that everyone is having sex all the time. But such is not the case.

I recently read an article about one couples’ struggle to get back to a healthy place in their sex life. In middle age, with kids, they are finding that things are slowing down in the bedroom. And doing some research, they discover they’re not alone. The author (Amanda Robb) writes:

Experts say that about 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men between ages 18 and 59 suffer from sexual problems; for women, low desire leads the list. Common causes include fatigue, stress, hormonal changes (childbirth and menopause for women, falling testosterone levels for men), weight gain, and the use of alcohol and certain drugs (both prescription and illicit), as well as anxiety, depression, and illness. Last year the New York Times reported that an estimated 15 percent of married couples had not made love during the previous six to 12 months.

You might want to read the article … it’s an interesting story. The couple turns to therapist and author David Snarch, and he helps them face an impasse in their marriage. The challenge for many couples is what Snarch calls “emotional gridlock.” Not dealing with the real issues that are dividing them, and therefore coexisting on a more or less superficial level.

I’ll close with my favorite quote from Snarch in the article: “Bottom line: If you are not able to effectively tell each other what you really mean, need, and want with your clothes on, how are you ever going to do it naked?”

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Many people pursue recovery as a quest for knowledge. They judge the value of a seminar, book, or meeting based on how much new information they picked up. If they don’t “hear anything new,” they tend to feel let down, as though it wasn’t worth their time.

The implicit assumption is that learning leads to progress: the accumulation of new knowledge brings you further along the path. Being exposed to a new concepts is often seen as learning something … if we can understand and grasp these new ideas, we feel like we’re moving forward.

Not necessarily.

What really matters is the process of translating that concept into tangible action. The “learning” of recovery involves not just storing more facts in our heads … it means acquiring new knowledge that changes who we are (including how we live).

As is often stated in recovery meetings, “this is a program of action.” The problem we must overcome in recovery is not new knowledge acquisition … it is execution. Our problem is not that we don’t know enough … the problem is that we don’t act on what we know.

This is manifest in the tendency we have to learn new things about recovery, start to apply them, and then shortly thereafter, move on to some other new insights, some other new approach, and start acting on those ideas. Meanwhile, we stop doing the things we had started to do at first, because we’ve jumped to a new set of priorities and actions.

When people get “slippery” in their behaviors and/or have slips, it pretty much always come down to this: they have stopped doing the fundamentals. They drift away from key practices that they identified as key positive steps to help them in their recovery (going to meetings, making calls, engaging in open conversations with their spouse, engaging in spiritual practices, etc). Alongside of this, they have likely started compromising some of the “middle circle” behaviors — things that are not necessarily breaking sobriety, but are unhealthy and feed our addictive tendencies (surfing around on the computer, isolating, harboring resentment, engaging in ‘harmless’ flirting, etc.).

Put very simply the issue is this: our problems in recovery usually don’t stem from things we don’t know … our problems stem from things we already know, but aren’t putting into action. Therefore the solution is probably not learning more stuff (going to workshops, seminars, counselors, and reading books and blogs … looking for new and novel ideas about recovery). The solution is putting our knowledge - however limited - into action. So we do the things mentioned above (the workshops, books, etc) with the hope that they will motivate and inspire us to act on what we already know.

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In the Twelve Step program, step two is: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

In step one, we admit that we are powerless over addictive sexual behavior and our lives have become unmanageable. We learn that we’re not evil, rotten people, but loved by God and others, in spite of our faults. We don’t have to be alone - isolated from authentic relationships - any longer. By ourselves, we are unable to overcome the power of our dependence on sexual behavior. In essence, Step one is about admitting that we need outside help.

As old-timers in 12 step programs say, step two is about learning to see addiction is a spiritual problem that requires a spiritual solution. This point is tricky for people who have a background in Christian teaching to understand. On the one hand, it seems to be an obvious reinforcement of the essence of the message we hear Sunday after Sunday: our problems have spiritual solutions … we need to turn to God for help.

The important question here is: “who is this ‘God’ we are turning to for help, and how do we expect to receive that help?”

The genius of the 12 step movement is also the thing that causes many Christians to view it with suspicion: the vague nature of how the Steps speak about God. This makes Christians nervous, because we want to be sure that we’re focusing on the God of the Bible.

But I have come to believe that many Christian people carry around in their heads ideas about God that have been filtered and distorted by their unprocessed abuse and abandonment, and further complicated by spiritually messed-up spiritual teaching they received during their formative years. Various views about who God is and how we relate to him can sound very “biblically-correct” but contradict other clear teaching in the Bible about God, and be very damaging to our souls.

The founders and early participants of the 12 step recovery movement recognized that overcoming addiction is tied to a spiritual awakening. But they also understood that nobody comes into recovery with a blank spiritual slate.

Some people have very little spiritual interest or experience prior to recovery, and so recovery involves embracing a faith they never had.

Other people come into the program with ideas about God that are distorted and childish. For them, the “spiritual awakening of recovery” involves a shift in their understanding and experience of faith, not moving from no-faith to faith. This is usually a process, it doesn’t happen overnight.

In my life, recovery has taught me to appreciate more fully that God’s grace in its various forms comes into my life through other people (I Peter 4:10). I have come to suspect any supposed spiritual insights that don’t get validation and reinforcement from the circle of trusted friends in my life. I also have come to suspect the validity and power of spiritual movements that move people away from honest interaction with others and into isolation and subjective spiritual experiences.

I mention this because it might help you understand that “coming to believe that God can restore us to sanity” is a lot less simple and a lot more profound than it first might appear. I invite you — and encourage you — to really reflect on this step, and talk about it with other recovery friends. What keeps the people I work with from an authentic Christian experience of life with God — and from recovery — is not irreligion … it’s bad religion.

* Note: this is an excerpt from the teaching in one of the days installments of the 90 Days to Sexual Sanity program. You can learn more about this program here.

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Special guest blog post by Peggy L. Ferguson, Ph.D.

(Note that this month, our teleseminar is also devoted to supporting spouses of addicts.)

Can the spouse of a sex addict find help individually for the effects of the sexual addiction on their lives? Sure. Much of the time, however, it is the crisis of discovery of the acting out, or some other related crisis that brings the sex addict and spouse into treatment. If the spouse gets help, it is usually because they seek services at the same time. Unfortunately, many times only the addict is treated.

Although there are inpatient and outpatient treatment services, many sex addicts and their partners have a difficult time finding an appropriate treatment provider. Couples may seek marriage counseling and not address the sexual addiction.

Possible reasons for this are varied, but couples often come to counseling with a variety of relationship complaints that may not be immediately identifiable as sexual addiction. Addiction-related behavior or problems may be hidden intentionally or unintentionally from the therapist and the couple may not understand the connections between the sexual behavior and their other presenting problems. Additionally, many treatment providers have a general lack of knowledge about sexual addiction.  Sexual addiction demands treatment.

Once sexual addiction has been correctly diagnosed, the addict’s number one goal would be abstinence from the compulsive sexual behavior(s).  A first step in achieving that goal is to define “abstinence”. Although abstinence in drug addiction treatment is easily defined, that is not necessarily the case with sexual addiction.  A lifetime of abstinence is not usually recommended, but treatment for sexual addiction will often involve complete sexual abstinence for a period of time (often 60-90 days),  Spouses should be part of the discussions about definitions of abstinence and any expectations of abstinence within the marriage for any period of time. This is important because couples often assume that they agree on something when it has not even been discussed.

Treatment for the addict and co-addict would involve education about sexual addiction. The importance of using all recovery resources available, (i.e., sex addicts anonymous (SAA), sexaholics anonymous (SA), Co-SA (co-dependents of sex addicts), group counseling, individual and couples counseling would be discussed. Therapists would also usually make reading recommendations.

What kinds of issues would the spouse of an addict work on in counseling? Many spouses initially have the attitude that it is the addict only that has “the problem”. But when you look at the devastation in your own life that is associated with the sex addiction, you begin to see not just the benefit of counseling but the importance of it.

Continue Reading »

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After years of working with people in recovery from sexual addiction, I have developed a program to help people make a new start in their recovery. Originally, this program was developed as a follow-up experience for people who go through our men’s workshops, but I have come to see that it’s also helpful for many people who want to make a new start in working on their sexual issues.

Each week you’ll get “daily guides” that contain meditations, teaching, and action steps to take each day that week. These guides average 35 pages per week (formatted to be readable on computer screen as well as printed out). The idea is to be doing some work every day towards recovery.

Along with the daily guides, each week you’ll get an hour-long audio seminar on a recovery topic. You’ll get the audio recording of the teaching session, along with the “action guide” (outline and space for notes). These audio seminars are usually recordings from teleseminars I’ve done, and include topics like:

• “What is relapse and how to prevent it”
• “How to find a local recovery group that fits your needs.”
• “The spiritual questions and challenges of recovery”
• “What spouses and parents need to know about sexual struggle”

To learn more - and/or to purchase this program … go to the new program website:

http://90daystosexualsanity.com

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